Category: Uncategorized

Stan reads Rodney.

When I was a little girl growing up in northern California among the wild and free, my mom used to get me to do Joe Cocker impressions at parties. That explains a lot, I think.

If you haven’t watched this, by the way, you haven’t yet lived life to the fullest.

p.s. Gary said on reading this post that he used to do Joe Cocker impressions at parties as a kid, too. So that’s either endemic to California kids of our generation or speaking volumes about our relationship.

Two possible titles for something:

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Yeah

Go Wild… and Get a Free Eyeliner! (in this morning’s spam crop)

Observations:

The soundtracks to one’s own movies become unavoidable brain feedback loops, sometimes a little deranging.

Lately my Yahoo horoscopes have been uncanny. I think it would be a nice writing project to sort of write around them on this blog, but I have other things to attend to. Still, here are three recent ones (three in a row!) that have amused me:

March 24, 2009

1.
CapricornCapricorn (12/22-1/19)

You can turn heads with your beautiful words today, so use your impressive creative writing skills whenever possible. Have you been trying to work up the nerve to make a move on someone? Write them a note and slip it to them when no one’s looking. Or send them an email that makes your goal clear. What you write will get you noticed and show people that you are not like everyone else. Your extra effort and refreshing creativity is more flattering than any trite come on or hollow gesture.

No comment, but always happy to turn heads with my beautiful words.

The next one I thought was wonderfully apropo of reading Santayana on the iPhone, particularly since he addresses subjectivity and taste with regard to aesthetics:

March 25, 2009

1.
CapricornCapricorn (12/22-1/19)

What is beautiful? Your answer to that question is different from anyone else’s answer to that question. No two people can always agree on aesthetic issues, and you will need to remember that today. Something you see as a great work of art won’t get quite the ecstatic reception you were expecting, so try not to take it personally. These critics might not like what they are seeing, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t like you! Respecting their opinions doesn’t mean you agree with them.

And this next one seemed to reassuringly address what I referred to in my last post as my tendency to be “so predictably emo,” although I have to say that the thought of “a giggle coming up from my belly” makes me think of nothing so much as barfing up a little reptile:

March 26, 2009

1.
CapricornCapricorn (12/22-1/19)

It might feel like your emotions are taking over your entire life right now, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. If you feel tears welling or a giggle coming up from your belly, don’t try to fight it. Just let it go and let yourself feel whatever you feel right now — it’s the only way to move through it. And don’t worry if these feelings seem to be putting you in a grumpy or introspective mood. You are an imperfect human and it is a healthy thing to process all your feelings.

A healthy thing.

What else? Last night I hung out with Sachiko, a former student from Japan. She was in my first class at my school in Tokyo, which means I taught her when I was 24. She now has two gorgeous kids. Really fun to speak Japanese again with her and her family and friends, even though my vocab is disintegrating. I stated my desire to move back there, and she encouraged me.

Insomnia more or less out of control lately. That makes my days wretched. Maybe the thyroid needs to be lowered again? It’s so weird how this controls me. The thing is, hyperthyroid & menopause signs are almost identical, so it’s hard to know what’s at the root of it. The migrating hives that visit me every night are the weirdest thing, and no one told me to expect that. The flashes come on so suddenly, like, whoa, must discharge molten lava/ feminine fire QUICK (although, OK, that’s romanticizing what is basically just moments of discomfort).

Oh, am I wearing my self-pity threads again? Sorry!

I need to post videos from last week, I know.

Unrelated: I dyed my hair fuschia:

I love to photograph myself not so much because I enjoy my own image, although to be honest I sometimes do, but because in myself I have such a cooperative model, and also in a way to convince myself that I do exist, sort of like when Colin Powell held up “proof” of Iraq’s WMDs, remember?

Oh jeez, I’m slipping into my Fanny Brice routine again:

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-4886971964734781240&hl=en&fs=true

Maybe I should try to sleep some more.

The cherry blossoms at the top of this page are optimistic. We are nowhere near that point here yet. I am pleased to report my first sighting yesterday of a BLOSSOMING PLUM TREE (white blossoms) from the window of the F train near Smith and 9th St. Station. In other news, magnolia buds are getting plump and velvety, forsythia is FINALLY starting to bust out, and (sorry to anthropomorphize) those brave little souls, the crocuses, have been making themselves known for a little while now. Gawd, what could be duller than a poet writing about spring.

Further note on “poetry and personality”: I thought to post on it for two reasons. One was that an antagonist of mine objected to my Tzara epigraph at right, saying that it promoted a (merely) expressive (as opposed to investigative) poetics. The other was a conversation after Segue a couple of weekends ago with James Sherry, who said that in editing Folly he had really tried to get me to approach my revisions of the book in a way that would forefront the symbiosis of individual and environment, but that I had responded in such a way that merely forefronted my personality. Fair enough, but you can’t squeeze ecopoetics from a turnip. At least my writing has personality, or more accurately, personalities.

I don’t actually feel much symbiosis with “my environment” (the term itself makes the individual apostate, doesn’t it? we have to change the language to be more gins & arakavian). Do you? I feel like a Venusian. I’m mainly thinking of the human environment, since the human presence in the city I live in overwhelms the non-human, and maybe that’s why the weather is so bad, as revenge (nothing more pathetic than a fallacy!). Walking down a particularly ugly street yesterday, I felt a huge thought like a cold wind in my face that the human world could have been anything, with all our imagination and resourcefulness and technology… and it’s… this? Buildings these stolid unmovable remnants of history & capital, awkwardly placed freeways, stoplights, trees fighting back making the sidewalk bumpy; it’s all so drastically unacceptable. It’s the personality that responds to that with, you know, lyric protest, that “scrawny cry,” that (this) thin, operatic no!

We need a catsitter to take care of Dante and Nemo and hang out in our apartment from May 14 to May 29 or so. Are any Ululations readers planning a NYC vacation around that time? Brooklyn, and our street, becomes very leafy and pleasant around that time.

It looks like we will not be crossing the Atlantic this year, but rather going westward to visit moms and friends in Portland, Corvallis, Ashland, and the Bay Area…

here, with smart commentary

Cool!

I can’t do it. I can’t post on “poetry and personality.” To do so I would have to a) define my terms and b) totalize, and honestly, every time I start to try to think about “personality” even pretend-methodically I can feel my mind start to flail about thinking well then I will have to know what a self is, won’t I, and then I start generating conjectures like the self is the sensorium, you know, that which loves and exults and suffers and gets bored, but then I wonder, isn’t it just my personality to reduce everything to sensation, to be so predictably emo? And is that my personality or my persona making those reductions? It could be that in fact I am truly much more methodical than my persona, who just likes to put a frosting of gaiety on her fatigue, and maybe under that fatigue there’s a kind of beautiful clockwork after all like a Cartesian animal.

What kind of animal? I imagine a kind of cat or donkey.

Reading Santayana on my iPhone:

The beauty of material is…the groundwork of all higher beauty, both in the object, whose form and meaning have to be lodged in something sensible, and in the mind, where sensuous ideas, being the first to emerge, are the first that can arouse delight.

To love glass beads because they are beautiful is barbarous, perhaps, but not vulgar…

Form cannot be the form of nothing. If, then, in finding or creating beauty, we ignore the materials of things, and attend only to their form, we miss an ever-present opportunity to heighten our effects.

Whenever the golden thread of pleasure enters that web of things which our intelligence is always busily spinning, it lends to the visible world that mysterious and subtle charm which we call beauty.

Etcetera. I could go on and on quoting this quaint philosopher (if only in an attempt to dodge my failure to address “poetry” and “personality” at all satisfactorily).

Bruce Andrews seemed very amused that I was reading Santayana on my iPhone (thanks to Project Gutenberg! Coolio!).

“You’re reading Santayana? George Santayana? That’s so… fifties!”

“I like the clear prose style. None of this… textuality nonsense…”

(that’s a joke. you understand that’s a joke, right?) (why is everything a joke for me? I should look at that.)

So, it’s Bruce’s personality to make comments like that, kind of affectionately sneering, and mine to be “sassy” (Bruce later in the conversation used the word to describe my personality) in response.

Personality, whatever it is, has an awful lot to do with voice, then, and voicings: what are they called, “performative utterances,” in the sense that I commit to a personality, promise the world at least a measure of repeated personality, in the accruing predictability of the kinds of statements I make and the way I inflect them. I shudder a little at the words voice and voicings, though, because I don’t want to mean them in any sort of Iowa-workshop way, but when I actually try to consider how I do mean them, I think it might actually not be very different. Those Iowa-workshoppians might not know it, but when they say a writer needs to “find her voice” what they really mean is that she needs to find a persona or personae to perform via utterances so that she can accrue an artificed writing personality and bequeath it “performatively” to the world. I do think that actual physical voice sounds and accents and lexicons give permissions and limits to the artifice. I mean like how Bruce sounds funny and caustic and sort of nasal, and how his voice is not small, and aren’t these aspects of his personality? My voice when I hear it sounds kind of pedantic, but I laugh a lot and use a lot of emphatic/ecstatic adjectives, or at least I think I do, and I think this has something to do with my personality as well. For those of you who are worrying about sincerity at this point, can’t we say that this voice to the extent that it is intrinsic, like really biologically so, it is “sincere”… and the rest is creative artifice, and leave it at that?

There’s something to be said, really, for living a life among poets and hearing them vivify their words with their peculiar voices. That certainly gives their poems even more personality. Kasey’s voice for example is deep and sonorous and metrically precise and also oddly goofy, a quality that contrasts with the other three qualities I mentioned but all the qualities very much define his poetics. I can’t look at a poem on a page by Katie, say, and not imagine it in her factual kind of deadpan voice punctuated with her sort of no-nonsense strong laughter, or read a poem of Drew’s online that I don’t hear in his special sarcastic/mystic/brainiac enunciation. I mean, right? Don’t these voices just ooze personality? And doesn’t whatever oozes inhere in the poems, even those poems that are composed only from “outside” materials? I’m thinking of Kenny reading at the BPC the transcript of the 9/11 newscast, for example, how the “art intelligence” of his voice transformed the words.

Oh okay but that’s reactionary, right, like I’m proposing some sort of essential self-voice that we already argued away in the 80s, right? But wait. What is this tenacious thing: personality?

I don’t know. I mean I’m not Santayana and I don’t have time to lay out my arguments in pretty aphorisms the way he did although it is fun to quote him. I have to get the words out REALLY FAST because tomorrow there will be some other whirlwind thought and also I have to blog about Terayama Shuji, I said I would, and besides I’m not doing this for school. I think a lot of poets behave as if what they are doing is something they are doing for school, and I say that not as an anti-academic, because I’m not, and I already said my voice sounds pedantic and a little snotty or self-conscious, and I’m a teacher, and I’m all for everyone learning as much as they can all the time, but then of course learning something and doing something for school are entirely different activities much of the time, now aren’t they. Is it a kind of torture reading this? I apologize in advance. I’m just trying to keep you with me in a simulacrum of real-time associative thought.

I suspect that when we read the work of writers who are no longer alive that we project our concept of their personality and voice onto the words, we deduce it from the syntax and the diction, and our projection sort of weaves into our Vygotskian stream of self-talk until we have an idea who is talking to us, even though that “person” is part “us.” Any biodata we are possessed of regarding the writer goes into the mix too, doesn’t it. I think even the most purist of us can’t keep it separate. Does anyone want to disagree? This is why I feel like I “know” Tolstoy (even in translation: sure, why not), Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Stein, etc.

It happens sometimes that the poetry a poet emits, though, and here I’m talking about poets I know, is strikingly different from how I conceive of their personality. This is very disorienting. I actually don’t want to give examples of that, because most often it is the personality I am more attracted to than the poetry, and the poetry disappoints me because I want it to be like the personality. Is this what it means to have not “found one’s voice”? When the disparity between the performed self in speech and the performed self in aesthetic writing is too great? It disturbs me that I might even think like that. That disparity is the essence of theatre, isn’t it? I don’t know, I’m confusing myself again. It strikes me though that in these cases what I am seeing is poets who are swayed by trends or who write how they think they ought to or out of maybe undeliberate pastiche of writers they admire? So that their enthusiasm or intention (the best media for “personality”) is interrupted or diluted by obligation in some cases? and possession (the extreme of “influence”) in others?

I really had intended to work on my movies tonight. It’s 10:11. I need to make better movies as I can see now how floppy the first one is. Or maybe I should just keep adding to it until I have a movie equivalent of that crazy painting of Jay deFeo’s? Since I made that blanket statement about no erasure? You see, I HATE when I totalize! I need to put away a pile of clothes. I need to not stare at a screen all the time. Do you guys remember this NY Times article? By Kevin Kelley?He wrote, I mean typed:

We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link.

OK look, it’s not that we don’t know that, that it’s not painfully obvious. It’s just a nice clear prose style, not like Santayana’s who also had a nice clear prose style, and nothing at all like mine because I apparently do not have a nice clear prose style even though I am not abstruse either. What can I say? I’m all over the place! I’m a total spaz [can we still say that?]! Help! Maybe it’s just my personality…